Over the holiday break I had some time to play with interesting ideas presented during the last SIGGRAPH. One thing which caught my attention was new analytical cloth BRDF from Sony Pictures Imageworks [EK17], which they use in movie production.

AshikhminD

Current state of the art of cloth shading in games still seems to be Ashikhmin velvet BRDF [AS07], which was popularized in games by Ready at Dawn [NP13]. It basically boils down to skipping geometry term, replacing traditional microfacet BRDF denominator by a smoother version and using an inverted Gaussian for the distribution term:

Full shader code (microfacet BRDF denominator and geometry term is included in V term):

float AshikhminD(float roughness, float ndoth)
{
    float m2    = roughness * roughness;
    float cos2h = ndoth * ndoth;
    float sin2h = 1. - cos2h;
    float sin4h = sin2h * sin2h;
    return (sin4h + 4. * exp(-cos2h / (sin2h * m2))) / (PI * (1. + 4. * m2) * sin4h);
}

float AshikhminV(float ndotv, float ndotl)
{
    return 1. / (4. * (ndotl + ndotv - ndotl * ndotv));
}

vec3 specular = lightColor * f * d * v * PI * ndotl;

CharlieD

Imageworks’ presentation proposes a new cloth distribution term, which they call “Charlie” sheen:

This term has more intuitive behavior with changing roughness and solves the issue of harsh transitions (near ndotl = 1) of Ashikhnim velvet BRDF:

Although Charlie distribution term is simpler than Ashikhmin’s, Imageworks’ approximation for the physically based height correlated Smith geometry term is quite heavy for real-time rendering. Nevertheless, we can just use CharlieD and follow the same process as in [AS07] for the geometry term and BRDF denominator:

float CharlieD(float roughness, float ndoth)
{
    float invR = 1. / roughness;
    float cos2h = ndoth * ndoth;
    float sin2h = 1. - cos2h;
    return (2. + invR) * pow(sin2h, invR * .5) / (2. * PI);
}

float AshikhminV(float ndotv, float ndotl)
{
    return 1. / (4. * (ndotl + ndotv - ndotl * ndotv));
}

vec3 specular = lightColor * f * d * v * PI * ndotl;

This results in a bit better looking, more intuitive to tweak and faster replacement of standard Ashikhmin velvet BRDF. See this Shadertoy for an interactive sample with full source code.

References

[NP13] David Neubelt, Matt Pettineo – “Crafting a Next-Gen Material Pipeline for The Order: 1886”, SIGGRAPH 2013
[AS07] Michael Ashikhmin, Simon Premoze – “Distribution-based BRDFs”, 2007
[EK17] Alejandro Conty Estevez, Christopher Kulla – “Production Friendly Microfacet Sheen BRDF”, SIGGRAPH 2017